10 reasons you never imagined to put your priorities on the wall

(or reasons to dig up information from your planner)

What exactly were your priorities?

The chart above is fictional, but do the represented data make sense to you? Let us know your opinion!

Also published on medium.com

If you are looking for new ways to leverage your goals, produce more, better control your time, truly execute what you plan, or simply make your routine flow, you already know that the bottlenecks of your day come from the battle between your true priorities and daily pressures and distractions.

This awareness that you need to defend priorities throughout the day is a huge step towards your goals. And from here, what can accelerate the game in your favor is a new perspective on this defense.

We make choices all day, but what guides them?

Start by understanding the purpose of your traditional organization and planning tools, such as calendars and planners, digital or not. These resources are essential for storing, not highlighting information, but highlighting might be precisely the boost you need now.

Your notes in calendars and planners remain hidden until you look for them.

Have you ever thought about how your traditional organization and planning tools depend on your memory, interest, and motivation? They need to be remembered, opened, and used through a series of tasks that often increase your cognitive overload. This makes you even more vulnerable to distractions, especially digital distractions.

And the more scattered your notes and consultations, the greater the chances of information never being found again, contexts not being understood, plans being left behind, applications falling into oblivion, or pages remaining blank.

Understand below ten surprising benefits of strategically displaying guiding information in your surroundings.

1. Immediate visibility

Greater visual impact, less cognitive overload: information displayed in your environment is simply “there,” requiring no effort to be remembered.

Always available, they don't require opening an app or notebook, scrolling the screen or flipping pages, learning new features, or overcoming steps. Strategically positioned, they are highlighted in your routine.

And whether they will have high exposure or be more discreet depends on the place you choose to fix them.

2. Guiding anchoring

Information you repeatedly capture is best fixed in your memory, a process you can strategically use to keep in mind data such as crucial dates, differential details, and inspiring insights into your biggest goals.

Being able to remember, throughout the day, the most important information for you makes all the difference in those moments when a trivial decision can ruin the deadline of a great personal goal.

And to strengthen this information, it needs to be highlighted.

Information strategically displayed in your surroundings is reinforced daily in your memory and has an increasingly strong voice in your decisions.

If fixed in a place you pass by often or stay in for a long time, the displayed information will be seen repeatedly throughout the day, both intentionally (when you look because you want to) and peripherally (glance perception). And the more it is seen, the more reinforced it will be in your memory.

As if by osmosis.

Or rather, anchoring.

3. Breadth of vision

The limited space of screens and pages requires a fragmented view of content that is broader than them, such as the representation of a timeline.

We normalize this fragmentation in daily life, but a complete view (the view of the whole) offers many more insights.

In your home, you already have means to visualize broad concepts like a timeline entirely: the vertical surfaces around you, such as walls and doors.

Walls allow the visualization of several months together, which helps connect events distant from each other and perceive relationships that go beyond the few weeks of a month.

4. Reduced screen time

The moments of viewing, analyzing, and updating information displayed in your physical environment are another offline activity in your day, contributing to the balance between your digital and physical experiences.

5. Direction and focus

By consistently dedicating yourself to offline activities, you also develop self-control regarding digital distractions, increasing not only your ability to maintain focus, but, before that, your ability to direct your attention.

6. Active copying

When you manually select, synthesize, and copy information from your planner and other organization and planning resources, such as in the use of visualizations in your surroundings, you also reinforce (and greatly!) the copied information. Active copying is an analytical and creative process in which you refine ideas and discover relationships, also stimulating your power of synthesis and your ability to generate solutions.

7. Customization, exclusivity, and practicality

Editing and printing at home allows you to create exclusive solutions, more significant and closer to your needs and preferences. No shipping or delivery time.

8. Privacy and freedom

Information stored outside your devices does not have a constant risk of invasion and leakage, which encourages a greater sense of freedom when creating your notes.

9. Timeless access

While digital records tend to progressively disappear into a “digital black hole” (lost in the cloud or on obsolete devices), physical records can be easier to store and locate in the future. Furthermore, they do not run the risk of depending on discontinued technologies, platforms, or devices.

10. Subsequent sensory and aesthetic experience

The writing, markings, and, depending on the materials used, the texture created on the paper by marks of use offer a satisfying visual and tactile experience, especially when you check this material later.

A goal and priority board on the wall facilitates your decisions

Information you see more often is more remembered and activated throughout the day, including in your decision-making moments. By helping to substantiate your daily choices, they become guiding elements in your daily life, directing your steps.

Could you say how much your priorities and goals guide your daily life?